Practiced Observation
by Spring Haze
Summary: Goren and Eames step back to get the big picture. Two short and seperate pieces.
1. Part 1: Goren

Title: Practiced Observation  
  
Author: Spring Haze  
  
Disclaimer: CI is not mine, nor are the characters.  
  
Notes: So, every time I sit down to write a short little incisive piece, I end up with long, rambling stories in which G and E sort out their 'issues'. I've scraped like 4 or 5 stories because of this. So rather than let all of the results go to waste, I took single segments from different stories and tried to make them readable. They are long bits of exposition, so there is no real storyline. Or dialogue, for that matter.   
  
These two seemed to thematically match, but they are definitely **not meant to be a response to each other**. I could possibly expand on them at some other time.  
  
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Part 1: Goren  
  
When she doesn't think he is paying attention, he watches her. It has become a habit, commenced the day they met  
  
Really, Goren silently assesses everyone he meets. He takes a few quiet minutes and listens to them interact with others, watches their mannerisms, listens for clues about their backgrounds. Things everyone does subconsciously, only he has made it a fine art and rigorous science. This aptitude has become the backbone of his work.  
  
He dedicates several weeks of focused and deliberate observation to his partners and immediate co-workers. It could never replace years of shared experience, of course, especially in a partnership. Only prolonged interaction with a partner can build an abiding trust and a profoundly intimate knowledge of each other's personalities.   
  
He knows that now. But on the day he met Eames, he had never experienced it personally.   
  
If a partner stayed on for more than a year or two, it was considered a miracle. It seemed the overlords had resigned themselves to an unofficial policy of rotating his partners automatically every so often.   
  
This had been fine with him, really. He'd just as soon work alone anyway, so it never occurred to him that not having a regular partner was any kind of loss.   
  
At that time, he had objectively viewed the fondness other detectives had for their long-time partners as an artifact of law enforcement culture— part coping-mechanism, part lifestyle, and part tradition. When he was younger, it was just the kind of sentimentality that he simultaneously envied and derided. As he grew older, he came to respect its place in the work, even without having experienced it himself.  
  
He had been introduced to Eames with the knowledge that she was being considered as potential partner. He hadn't really thought twice about it, as usual, until the candidate was standing before him. This was a thoroughly routine event, and not worth his time until it was actually occurring.  
  
Now, Goren wonders if he is always so smug.   
  
The requisite weeks of practiced scrutiny that followed their introduction proved to be a waste of his abilities. Alex Eames would single-handedly change his professional habits where countless others had failed.   
  
Over just a few months time, he felt himself not merely accommodating her presence, but stumbling upon new patterns and rhythms to follow. It was a kind of collaboration he hadn't experienced before. It felt almost as though she was the key for a mental door he never knew existed. When it was opened, his work became precise, efficient, and disciplined.   
  
But it went beyond the simple correction of his weak spots. In a short time, they were entirely synchronized. As the years have passed, they have become almost symbiotic.   
  
He thrives on it. Sometimes he feels like a coil ready to spring when she plies his imagination with streams of information, or when they build effortlessly upon each other's actions while undercover. By the time he gets to interrogation, he unleashes with an enormous amount of momentum behind him. He was great before, but he is almost limitless now.   
  
While he hates to attribute anything to fate, he can't help but be a bit superstitious regarding their partnership.   
  
It is a whole new world.  
  
All the same, a tiny part of it smacks a bit too much of failure. Four years ago, he stood face-to-face with his own personal revolution embodied in a small, deceptively unassuming woman, and he hadn't even the sense to recognize her. 


	2. Part 2: Eames

Part 2: Eames  
  
The first time she saw Goren in interrogation, she was totally and absolutely mind blown. Even still, as a practiced observer, she would get lost in his performance.  
  
She was used to being an interrogation-room wallflower when Goren was around; most of the time she simply absorbed his excess energy, and watched in resigned awe as this rather quiet man suddenly geared up to break the sound barrier.  
  
There were many times when she may as well not have been there. But occasionally his eyes would drift in her direction-- usually to signal her next line, or the need for her to exit, or to prompt her to provide a distraction for a moment.  
  
His eyes, wild and dark, would lock with hers. She, in turn, would raise her nose, just a little. It was pure reflex on her part, something she always did when she felt herself under the eyes of an alpha male. Something she only did with Goren when they were in interrogation.  
  
Then it would magically become clear what he wanted from her, and she would act accordingly, as though the message was piped directly into her head by God.  
  
The reality was that they had a mutual ability to read each other, developed by several years of practice, and supported by a complex web of unnamable emotional connections.  
  
However, she wouldn't lie to herself. The strange automation of her response to him was also a testament to the dominance he exuded when his powerful mind was emotionally engaged.  
  
It made her wonder what he would be like in a personal battle of wills, loosed from even the minimal professional constraints that existed for him, unfettered by the need to maintain a façade of normalcy around his colleagues.   
  
The image her mind conjured sent shivers down the length of her spine. Her question became—what would provoke such intensity in him?  
  
She hadn't the faintest, which only served to point out the fantastical element in her thinking.  
  
In fact, he usually showed an exaggerated sensitivity whenever they would have a disagreement. He had a paranoid fear of argument, like it would collapse the whole house of cards that they had built together.  
  
For all of his brilliance, he didn't seem to understand that their house of cards was firmly encased in cement, as far as she was concerned. She trusted him entirely.   
  
Still, she always noted his reticence when things got tense, and tried her best to get her point across with out it becoming personal. She never held back; Goren needed to be questioned and challenged. That was part of her job. But she understood that he feared that someday she would be pushed too far, and would leave.  
  
Nothing could be further from the truth.   
  
Her mind grappled with the idea that the same man she wondered at in the interrogation room also desperately feared abandonment. Specifically, her abandonment of him.  
  
And then she understood exactly what it would take to push House of Cards Bobby to become Interrogation Room Bobby.  
  
Not that she would ever do it. But the realization deserved a footnote. 


End file.
